BOOKS may be to the creation of a temperamen- tal inclination for a whole spate of behaviors-including, as a geneticist friend of mine remarked facetiously, a willingness to discuss your sex life in an interview with a geneticist. A genetic link to sexual orientation may be only indirect. Hamer says that he has replicated his results (his new findings are under prepublication review), but they have not been replicated outside his laboratory; no one has reproduced LeVay's, either-not even LeVay, who has not attempted the task. Tracing variations between gays and straights to a minute region of the hypothalamus could prove to be merely a kind of interior phrenol- ogy-an attribution of behavioral differ- ences to different-sized bumps in the brain that might have little, if any, func- tion in human sexual orientation. Both the anImal research and the human re- search have been challenged at their foundation-the claim that the brains of human males and females develop differenrly, and the implication that gay men are, as Darrell Yates Rist, a co- founder of the Gay and Lesbian Alli- ance Against Defamation, contemptu- ously phrased it, "hermaphrodites of sorts, sporting feminine brains in mas- culine bodies." LeVay and Hamer defend them- selves against some of the technical chal- lenges vigorously, if not altogether con- vincingly. For example, Angela Patta- tucci, one of Hamer's collaborators, who is herself gay, reported In a talk at the California Institute of Technology, in September, 1993, that one reason Hamer's group did not examine the Xq28 region of the gay brothers' straight male siblings is that those siblings might have been less than candid about their straightness: "Heterosexuality is an in- herently unreliable category." Still, Le Vay and Hamer readily admit that they don't know how genes influence braln development and sexual orienta- tion, and agree that some of the techni- cal challenges merit attention. They righrly contend that the debates can be advanced only by further inquiry into the biology of seXual orientation, which, they write in their own article in the May, 1994, issue of Scientific American, is warranted if only because such re- search "can help dispel some of the myths about homosexuality that in the past have clouded the image of lesbians and gay men." LeVay has chosen to dis- pel myths by leaving the Salk Institute in order to establish the Institute of Gay and Lesbian Education, in West Hol- lywood, which opened its doors in September, 1992, and whose aim is to provide instruction relevant to homo- sexuals in subjects such as litera- ture, law, and science. Hamer, as he continues his research on Xq28, does his best to discourage biologi- cal myths, emphasizing the limits of what his group has learned, and stressIng, as he declares in his book, that although sexuality is founded on genes, it "is swayed by personal history, society, and culture." If Hamer is chary of the liberationist hopes that some have pinned to his re- search, he is equally impatient with the charges that he has opened a ho- mophobic Pandora's box. At the close of his paper in Science he states-in a rare declaration for a scientific article-that it would be "fundamentally unethical" to use the kind of information his group has developed "to assess or alter a person's current or future sexual orien- tation, either heterosexual or homo- sexual, or other normal attributes ofhu- man behavior." In an attempt to make the statement something more than a piety, he goes on to say in his book that if his laboratory should discover a gay gene he would exercise whatever patent rights he might obtain in such a way as to pre- vent any technology based on his work from being used for the kind of prena- tal selection dramatized in Jonathan T olins' play. Constitutional law already stands squarely in the way of any state-mandated abortion of "gay" fetuses, and so does the tough fabric of social values, even among homophobic social conservatives: to endorse such reproductive selection would force them into a contortion of their anti -abortion principlès. The kind of discrimination that the identifica- tion of a gay gene might enable is a pri- vate one-the type embraced by the Golds-that HaI?er proposes to prevent by restricting the use of his prospective patents. For all his good intentions, though, Hamer should know better. 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